Left: my tracing, Friday 25 September. Right: John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, 1888, oil on canvas — Tate, London, N01543 (image: Wikimedia Commons). Public domain.
The tracing · Auction · Background
Okay, so, The Lady of Shalott. A tricky one, I feel like. He does a lot of gorgeous stuff. The eyes, are the key. And part of that figure, the hand.
An empty eye (like the pupil-less ovals I drew) reads differently from the darkly inward-looking, red eyes in Waterhouse’s painting. In a line drawing, I’d say the blank eye is mostly unfinished — I was just using them as orientation markers, whereas Waterhouse’s shading of the eye sockets carries all the expression. Mine are faintly expressive, but they don’t do the work his do.
There’s a bob of hair, and there’s this arm. And then this hair that kind of radiates out. And the seated pose.
Hair radiates outward, and in the painting it streams sideways even though she sits upright and the water’s flat — Tennyson sets the voyage in an autumn storm, so the hair carries motion where almost nothing else does. As an expressive device in a still figure, I think the silhouette survives line better than I’d expected. The red in Waterhouse contrasts so much that he already set the hair apart; in line, the shape carries what the colour did.
And the sleeve is, of course, drawing lines to itself. And what a colourful — what a boat. And all the stuff in the background. There’s a lot of expression in those lines.
When you strip the narrative — the woven tapestry, the crucifix, the three candles, the lantern, the chain — you’re left with just the woman and a hint of the boat’s edge. That story sits entirely in the props, and a figure-only tracing teaches how much of a Victorian narrative painting is actually about the figure versus the props. With all that symbolism gone, it’s only the mastery that’s left — the geometry, the anatomical knowledge. I think Waterhouse was so good he could afford to entertain himself with symbolism, but what catches the eye first is always the painting skill. That’s what makes you recognize her.
This hairband gives form with just a pair of lines. It’s there, clearly, to provide that geometric information. And then just ride the hair down here. Then we get the shoulder.
The hairband and the belt are cross-contours — curves that wrap around a form and show the volume underneath. But what struck me about these two was how masterfully minimal they are: they carry so much of the head and waist against all those long radiating lines of hair. They’re chosen exactly right, both geometrically and for what they tell you about the figure.
A little more of the drapery, I think, by the hand. It’s okay, because it kind of pulls a little bit there. I’m leaving off more of the face on purpose. It isn’t a likeness; it’s the expression I was trying to figure out.
I suppose you can put the back of the belt over the rest of the belt, just to make it clear that it’s also ornate.
This face is not the same as that one. There’s more, obviously, facial structure and everything. But some of the expression, perhaps, is there. And for this chin, I didn’t even draw the jawline much. Just the silhouette. Which I think is fine. One could add more hair stuff, but it could sort of distract from this.
A uniform line weight — the fine liner — forces a different kind of choice. A brush or dip pen swells and thins with pressure: you get natural variation, like in Schiele or Klimt or Japanese brush drawing. But uniform line forces simplicity and thought; it penalizes slavishly following values or lines. You have to know that this thickness is impactful, and you have to be selective. I looked through Frédéric Forest just before drawing, and though this is far from his work, his line feels fundamental to how I think about drawing.
Auction. The Lady of Shalott itself has never been to auction: Sir Henry Tate gave it to the nation in 1894, and it’s still in the Henry Tate Collection at Tate Britain. Waterhouse’s other paintings do come up. The Siren (1901), an 81 × 53 cm oil, was offered at Sotheby’s London in 2018 at an estimate of £1–1.5 million (Sotheby’s, lot 12). Its provenance runs through two earlier Christie’s sales, in 1917 and 1958. An early work, A Young Saint (early 1870s), was estimated at £30,000–50,000 in the same season (Sotheby’s, lot 14).
Background. John William Waterhouse painted The Lady of Shalott in 1888, oil on canvas, 153 × 200 cm (Tate Etc.). It illustrates the end of Tennyson’s poem (Wikipedia). Cursed to see the world only in a mirror and weave what she sees, the Lady looks out directly at Lancelot, and the mirror cracks. She takes a boat down the river to Camelot, singing, and dies on the way. In the painting she sits on the tapestry she has woven, with a lantern at the prow, a crucifix, and three candles, two of them already out. Her hand is on the chain: in Tennyson’s words, “She loosed the chain, and down she lay”.
Waterhouse came back to her twice (Wikipedia): The Lady of Shalott Looking at Lancelot (1894, Leeds Art Gallery), and I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, Said the Lady of Shalott (1915, Art Gallery of Ontario).
Writing in Tate’s magazine, the artist Donna Huddleston singles out the eyes: “darkly inward looking and, astonishingly, as vividly red as her hair” (Tate Etc., 2019). Sir Henry Tate presented the painting in 1894. It hangs at Tate Britain in Art for the Crowd 1815–1905.
Links
- The Lady of Shalott — Tate — the collection record, N01543
- Donna Huddleston on The Lady of Shalott — Tate Etc., 2019 — an artist on the painting
- The Lady of Shalott (painting) — Wikipedia — the poem, the symbols, the three versions
- Master image — Wikimedia Commons — Google Art Project scan
- The Siren — Sotheby’s, 2018, lot 12 — estimate and provenance
- Process video — Friday 25 September — YouTube